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For the last few years — alas, I wish I’d done this always from a child — I’ve kept a list of every book I’ve read.

Yesterday my list for 2018 hit 50 books, and here they are. I like complete freedom in choosing books, so I don’t make any kind of reading plan, and often bypass my pile of recently purchased books to choose others. I use the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library (for audiobook downloads) a lot. I follow my interests (in the last few years, Russia, pre-and-post revolution), or powerful suggestions, such as the Backlisted Podcast, which brought me to #27, 28, 32, or books mentioned on other podcasts I listen to. I note when I’ve listened to a book instead of reading it on paper, but I consider listening equivalent to reading. In some cases, it’s superior to reading — for instance, hearing the audio of “Purple Hibiscus” gave me the Nigerian accents and pronunciations of names without which the experience would have been much flatter. I also like audiobooks for history, which I’ll happily listen to all the way through instead of getting bogged down in the paper book.

I’m committed to maintaining my ability to concentrate for long bouts of reading, in physical books. I did read a couple of these books on my iPad because e-books were the only format the public library had to lend, but while I don’t condemn it, I’ll still never prefer it.

The books that wowed me the most are in bold.

1 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets Svetlana Alexievich Audiobook

2 Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine Anne Applebaum Audiobook

3 The Orchid House Phyllis Shand Allfrey

4 The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars Daniel Beer Audiobook

5 Niels Lyhne Jens Peter Jacobsen

6 City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War John Strausbaugh Audiobook

7 The Adolescent (The Raw Youth) Fyodor Dostoevsky

8 Hotel Savoy Joseph Roth

9 Nothing is True And Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia Peter Pomerantsev Audbiobook

10 Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 & How It Changed The World Laura Spinney Audiobook

11 The Shooting Party Anton Chekhov

12 The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

13 Notes From Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky

14 The Double Fyodor Dostoevsky Audiobook

15 Caught in the Revolution—Petrograd, Russia, 1917 Helen Rappaport

Audiobook

16 My Cousin Rachel Daphne Du Maurier Audiobook

17 Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: A Essay in Contrast George Steiner

18 Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birdbizhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region Masha Gessen Audiobook

30 An Empire On the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America Nick Bunker Audiobook

31 Kudos Rachel Cusk

32 The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Sebastian Faulks

33 Remember Me Like This Bret Anthony Johnston

34 American Wife Curtis Sittenfeld Audiobook

35 The Turn of the Screw Henry James Reread/Audiobook

36 A Wrinkle in Time Madeline L’Engle Reread/Audiobook

37 Journey into the Mind’s Eye: Fragments of an Autobiography Lesley Blanch

38 Purple Hibiscus Chimananda Ngozi Adichie Audiobook

39 Trotsky in New York 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution Kenneth Ackerman Audiobook

40 The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson: The End of a Beautiful Friendship Alex Beam Audiobook

41 Red Plenty Francis Spufford Audiobook

42 The People’s Act of Love James Meek

43 In A Lonely Place Dorothy Hughes

44 The World Broke in Two: Woolf, Eliot, Forster Lawrence and the Year That Changed Literature Bill Goldstein Audiobook

45 Florida Lauren Groff

46 Asymmetry Lisa Halliday

47 Corpus Christi Bret Anthony Johnston

48 The Rainbow D H Lawrence Audiobook

49 Days of Awe: Short Stories A M Homes

50 The Best American Short Stories 2016 Junot Diaz, editor

The book by Lesley Blanch was so much fun for me, because it hit my reading pleasure center in multiple ways — a lot of romantic tosh about pre-revolution Russia, a transgressive love affair, enthusiasm about books, and evocative descriptions of foreign places — Blanch writes about the origins and experiences of her life-long obsession with Russia, a Russia of fairy tales, wolves chasing sleighs across stony wastes, onion domes, extravagant despots. It’s an absolutely charming book, and it came to me at random — NYRB republished it and sent it to me as part of a subscription; I think I enjoyed it more for not having anticipated it at all.

Without faith in a Christ as god-man, and the life after death Christianity promises, Dostoevsky believed, humanity is doomed to squalid, cruel disorder. No other intellectual system based on atheism, however well-functioning in practice, even in a sort of utopia where everyone is enthusiastic about wanting to help everyone else be happy and good, can possibly succeed; without the prospect of Heaven, and judgment, humankind inevitably breaks down to debasement. He saw this all around him in mid-19th century Russia, in the government, the rulers, the behavior and mores of the aristocracy, dissolution of the family (as he perceived it), and the desire to turn away from Russian-ness and emulate the culture of Western Europe.

At the same time he seemed to feel that none of the disorder in Russia was ever going to be reparable. That the the peasants (recently freed serfs, after the 1860s) were always going to be a somehow incomprehensible other, even as they supposedly possessed the purest highest form the the Russian soul.

I’ve been delving into Dostoevsky for a few years now on and off, reading and then listening to audios of the major novels; I’ve gone from not being able to read him at all in my younger days, to finding him as absorbing and rereadable as Henry James or Tolstoy. I had to discover how to read him, and retune myself to the higher emotional pitch he demands — not even Tolstoy prepared me for the high hysteria of a Dostoyevsky character. His people start out at 11.

But it was just this past couple of weeks that I read his big novel The Adolescent (or A Raw Youth as an earlier English translation calls it), which was his next to last — written between Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. According to the introduction, it was not well received at the time of publication and tended to be overlooked since.

There was a lot to it that made it a tough read — some flatness to characters, a ridiculously melodramatic plot turning on possession and purloining of a compromising letter. (Does the word ‘purloin’ ever get used anymore except with the word ‘letter’ in the same sentence–and barely even then.) But from it I got what seems to be my clearest understanding yet of what Dostoevsky was on about, and in a way that connected more directly than before with my own moral preoccupations, uncertainties and dreads.

This post has been in draft form for well over a week, and I’ve kind of lost track of it, because I was working on a short story with my writers group–trying a form I’m very unaccustomed to attempting, and especially after a year when any creative impulses I might have had were buried against the onslaught of my elderly parents’ emergency.

I’m now stuck into George Steiner’s first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, An Essay in Contrast, (the title always makes me think The Beatles or The Stones, why do we have to pick?), as well as an audio of The Double.

Also just finished Peter Pomerentsev’s nonfiction book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. which contains nothing that would contradict any of Dostoevsky’s points about Russia and humanity, each chapter setting out a story of frightening dangerous absurdity, Pomerentsev’s parents emigrated from the Soviet Union to London, and he went back as an adult to work in television, wanting to make documentary films about the post-Soviet social upheavals. Through interviews with various players, both Russians and foreigners who worked in Russia during those years, he shows us, from the point of view of suicidal models, crusading lawyers, shameless oligarchs, unsuspecting entrepreneurs, and brash social climbers, a perspective on the decades following the fall of the SU that’s fascinating in it’s horror and horrible in its fascination.

Once in a while I think about picking up a different sort of book and taking a break from dwelling on Russia, my obsession with it sometimes feeling like a half-open scab I keep picking picking picking. There’s a weird pain-into-pleasure I experience as I read Russian literature or books about Russian life and history. Nothing else feels as inviting to me now, anyway. It’s not that I need to “get to the bottom of it” but this immersion is filling some kind of need in me for the squalor, ugliness, human cruelty, occasionally leavened by a spiritual light that I myself don’t believe in, delivered in a beautiful and meaningful package of prose fiction. The way everything in all these books not just goes up to 11, but seems to start there and go up into ever more shrill, sublime human places that seem otherwise invisible to fictive worlds of other languages and cultures, just keeps pulling me. The other day I even listened to some Mussorgsky.

And rewatched the 2012 film version of Anna Karenina, which is now on Netflix, and which has always struck me as being a great adaptation, and a visual treasure with a well-chosen cast, look, and feel.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Count Vronsky

I especially admire how the film is staged, literally, on a stage–and behind the stage, to illustrate how performative is the society from which Anna tries to rebel.

Set on the Caribbean island of Dominica in the 1920s-30s, it’s the story of a white colonial family fallen into decadence, told, mostly, from the point of view of their black servant Lally, a loyal, devoted retainer of the kind who from today’s perspective, comes across as a bit sickening, a bit incredible. The story centers on the family’s three daughters, and the choices they make as young adults, inevitably leaving the island and then just as inevitably, returning.

The decadence is best represented by the men of the story, who, unlike Lally and the three daughters she worships, Stella, Joan and Nathalie, are not characters so much as symptoms. The father, traumatized by his WWI experience, is a drug-addicted recluse; Andrew, the cousin whom each girl grew up loving and wanting, has succumbed to TB and a the shadow-life of living in sin with a woman of color (who is also, of course, a cousin–as in a story of the American south, the island is populated by offspring, both white and black, of certain white men whose ancestors were the original colonizers.

The whole thing has a powerful aroma of nostalgia, as the characters struggle between the old natural beauty of the island, which is woven into the very fiber of their privilege, and the outcomes of each daughter’s rushing out to meet modernity and the larger world, and wanting to bring something of that back to the old home place, to try to cure it, or use it as an escape. Lally’s expectations for the return of these little girls she nursed and brought up are immense; she knows them but in many ways she doesn’t understand their adult selves, and her hopes for what they’ll do are lit with a romantic glow that the sisters themselves can no longer really obtain.

As if to show that the past can’t be recaptured, the girls’ returns to Dominica are staggered; first comes Stella, the eldest, with her little son; she’s made a foolish marriage and is now fleeing a hardscrabble New England farm life with a man she doesn’t really know. When Joan arrives, Stella leaves, and Lally turns her hopes to her, even as she dreads seeing her involve herself in local politics, agitating for the impoverished black islanders and bringing on the ire of the church and the white establishment. Nathalie, the youngest, a rich widow who seems to live for partying and every frivolity — but without whose financial support the family home would collapse entirely — it’s she who can summon the realism, and the resources, to force activity out her family’s indolence.

Shand Allfrey is telling a version of her own life story — she, like Jean Rhys, whom she knew slightly, grew up on Domenica; unlike Rhys she never really left it. (Rhys was supposed to write a forward to the reissue of the book in 1979, but died before she could do so Like the middle daughter in her story, Joan, Shand Allfrey married in England, involved herself in left-wing politics, and ultimately returned to live in Dominica and work there for social reform. This delightful book was her only novel.

The B in the title to this post is represented by Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum, a reissue of the 1929 German novel by NYRB. I’ve never seen the famous movie version, so am coming at it fresh, and not very far in; will write about it in a future post.

On audio, I just finished Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine and have moved on to The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars, which is adding context to the audio of Dostoyevsky’s Notes From a Dead House, which I’ve also got going, as part of my ongoing All Things Russian reading project. This one goes into great detail about the Decembrists, bringing me a vague sense of what that was to a much sharper understanding of who these early Russian political rebels were and what their punishment and the afterlife of their cause entailed. The book also explains how Siberia came to be a scene of penal banishment in the first place, another of those things you think you know about until you realize you really don’t. The one drawback to listening to these books as opposed to reading them, is that the names just go by me in a whoosh, whereas on the page I’d sound them out and remember them better.

TCM showed the 1958 movie version of The Brothers Karamazov the other evening, which turned out to be a more credible adaptation than I thought when I sat down

to watch it; a lot left out, of course, but what was there really kept my eye and interest, and the whole thing looked right — the cast, costumes, sets, etc. Though I had to laugh at William Shatner as Alyosha, the youngest brother who wants to go into a monastery. (He was sure pretty, though.)

NancyKay Shapiro

Writing about my interactions with books and delight in reading, present and past. Inevitably some observations about my own life and experiences will come in to it. Introductory blog post here. Follow me on Twitter.